Knorr, a Soup in Every Stew: over 13 million entries reaching one in four households in South Africa.

Brandtone partnered with Unilever Foods in 2012 to create the first mobile marketing campaign for Knorr Soup. The intention was that this campaign would change the landscape of marketing for Knorr packet soups in South Africa and take Knorr’s conversation with their consumers to the next level by engaging in a two way conversation with the target market.

Brandtone’s platform ensured that valuable consumer insights were gathered as part of every interaction, generating a database of loyal and engaged consumers. The size of the campaign database exceeded its target by over 400%, engaging 4 million unique consumers (from a target of just over 750,000) and Unilever is now able to communicate directly with these audiences.

The Brief

Brandtone’s objective for Knorr was to:

Inspire mums in the kitchen and reward them for using Knorr packet soups, through offering them recipe tips and cooking ideas.

Create an extensive consumer database (a target of over 750,000) to aid long term relationship building with consumers – not only in relation to Knorr but for other brands within the Unilever portfolio.

Build engagement with Knorr Packet Soup by creating an integrated experience that would allow the brand to reach consumers in a fun, simple and accessible way. The target, over 5,250,000 entries.

The Campaign

Consumers were directed to find their unique code inside the pack and enter the number by USSD (a low-tech form of data messaging) in order to be eligible for a reward.

A key driver of this campaign’s success was that rewards were relevant, instant and designed specifically for the target market.

Airtime provided the ideal incentive as 89% of targeted consumers use “prepaid” phones. If consumers did not win airtime, they received a Knorr Recipe Tip via SMS. Tips were linked to the variant the consumer had bought, thus making the recipe content highly relevant. Airtime rewards were topped up automatically within 24 hours on winner’s phones, creating instant gratification and providing a highly efficient way for Knorr to reward customers.

We created a simple profiling process, asking straightforward questions that consumers would be comfortable answering, making the engagement fast yet rich in terms of information gathered.

Knorr now has access to a database that allows them to segment their market by region, light, medium and heavy users, what competitor products are used and so on. This will be used to communicate with consumers in an even more targeted way next year.